Memories of My Father Watching TV has as its protagonists television
shows, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The
shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared
experience. And in Curtis White's hands, they become a son's projections
of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in
Combat, Highway Patrol, Bonanza, and other television shows (and one
movie) from the 1950s and '60s. Comic in many ways, Memories is finally
a sad lament of father-son relationship that is painful and tortured,
displayed against a background of what they most shared, the watching of
television, the universal American experience.